Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Wovoka, Paiute Shaman

  Source: National Archives and Record Administration.

  More than a prophet, many envisioned Wovoka as their new Christ. In his study for the Bureau of Ethnology, the pioneering anthropologist James Mooney recorded one curious Indian observer noting that that those living in Paiute land were “anxious to see Christ. Just before sundown I saw a great many people, mostly Indians coming dressed in white men’s clothes. The Christ was with them. They all formed in this ring around it . . . I had always thought the Great Father was a white man, but this man looked like an Indian.” He instructed everybody to join “the Christ singing while we danced.” One Indian, according to Mooney, thought he was beholding the risen Jesus: “I had heard that Christ had been crucified, and I looked to see, and I saw a scar on his wrist and one on his face, and he seemed to be the man.”

  Jesus as a figure increasingly stood in for the symbolic Indian, standing in judgment of whites. In his rendering of a letter from the Indian Messiah, Mooney said that Wovoka claimed to be revealing and concealing Christ’s return and that righteous judgment was about to come: “Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again.”

  At Wounded Knee in South Dakota shortly before the end of 1880s, soldiers from the U.S. Army warily eyed Indians who danced continuously for days, fell into trances, and foresaw the deaths of their enemies and the re-creation of an Indian world. Forces both within the military, and from Republican politicians eager to secure new states for their political column, pressured for a public response to the apparent uprising. In late December, the ghost dance turned into a bloodbath. When federal troops led by Colonel James Forsyth attempted to disarm Sioux warriors in South Dakota—warriors who claimed to have no arms—U.S. forces opened fire on women, men, and children. Four days after Christmas in 1890, almost two hundred natives died for living their faith.

  Memories of Custer and the epic defeat of American troops at Little Bighorn played directly into the massacre at Wounded Knee. Veterans of Little Bighorn felt they could get their revenge fourteen years later. The political and spiritual leader of the Indian alliance in Montana, Sitting Bull, was killed at Wounded Knee by Indian agency police in a tragic prelude to the larger massacre to come at the hands of frightened and ill-led members of the 7th Calvary. This was the same 7th which had been surrounded, harassed, and killed in substantial numbers by the Lakota/Cheyenne alliance in Montana which possessed superior numbers, firepower, and tactical savvy. It was the same 7th led into battle by Custer’s favorite Irish jig of a battle tune, “Garry Owen,” played later to honor the brave soldiers at Wounded Knee who had withstood the treacherous savages (including at least seven infants and a number of boys between five and eight years of age) and received their Medals of Honor.

  Perhaps most importantly of all, in both cases (Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee), the political spin machines and telegraph-driven need to feed the sleepless beast of the national news cycle went into overdrive as soon as the events were over. In the case of Wounded Knee, Americans at the time did not really come to know truth; the story of heroic soldiers defending innocent whites held the day. In both cases, when compelled to choose between printing the fact or the legend, the legend, as usual, won. And Wounded Knee ushered in a period that constituted the “nadir” of Native American existence (in terms of population numbers and spiritual despair), much as the advent of Jim Crow and racial violence in the 1890s forced black Americans to confront what seemed to be an endless night of Jim Crow. The hopes of many for remaking American citizenship in the age of Reconstruction met the powerful forces of a rising tide of sentiments of racial supremacy and the “reforging of the white Republic” in the late nineteenth century.

  LATINO CATHOLIC ENDURANCE

  Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first Archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, entered New Mexico territory in 1851. Lamy joined a group of European-born priests who sought to rationalize and systematize a Catholicism in the Southwest that they saw beholden to superstitious traditions. One Protestant home missionary late in the nineteenth century summarized the views of Lamy and his fellows in the priesthood as well. As he saw it,

  The people in this place are industrious but they are living in darkness and superstition. They believe in witches. They believe that people turn into cats, and may become men and women again at pleasure. The paganism in this land of Christian liberty would astonish Eastern people. We call it home missionary work. It is as foreign as though the Pacific Ocean separated us from the United States.

  The Southwest had become part of the United States through the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, but its people were far from assimilated. Latino Catholicism did not fit within the bounds of habitation white Americans had constructed for what would be recognized as respectable religion.

  By 1865, Lamy had recruited thirty-seven priests, erected forty-five churches, and enlisted the Sisters of Loretto to look after schools. Lamy ordered the retablos taken down from church walls and replaced with images more akin to French Catholic iconography, in a move strikingly reminiscent of the priests’ policy toward Indian religious objects in the seventeenth century prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. In the late nineteenth century, in the period following Mexican independence and into the era of American expansion, bishops derided the perceived decline of religion in the Southwest, comparing it to an alleged golden era arising from early missionary work. In this view, American clergy would now have to fill the vacuum left by the decline of the local church in the Mexican era. The continuance of faith traditions among Latino communities was ignored, for this would call into question their need to be rescued. He also worked to discipline the Pentitente brotherhoods and put them under church authority. Some scholars argue that Lamy tried to eliminate the Penitentes entirely. The evidence for this is not clear. Certainly, however, Lamy sought to strengthen and centralize church authority over the disparate practices of the region. In doing so, he fought with local Latino leaders such as Padre Antonio Martinez, as detailed in chapter 3.

  In Arizona and elsewhere, Euro-American Catholic leaders banned Mexican fiestas and other celebrations. Bishop Thaddeus Amat y Brusi (usually shortened as Bishop Amat), the first Bishop of Los Angeles, feared that public expressions of Latino devotion would simply play into rampant anti-Catholicism. Likewise, in New Mexico, Archbishop Lamy felt that the practices of the Penitentes and other groups were “contrary to modern ecclesiastical order and harmful to the image of Catholicism in the eyes of newcomers from the East.” The bitter anti-Catholicism of some civil leaders persuaded Lamy even further in his effort to ban practices out of line with what he saw as Church teaching. For example, in administering the sacraments, Lamy queried recipients as to whether they were Penitentes, since members were denied the sacrament. Into the early twentieth century, the position of the bishops was represented by Charles Buddy, first bishop of San Diego, who condemned some practices as a “source of scandal” that could “easily weaken the faith of the people,” notably public dances during the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  Local Latino Catholics responded simply by resisting efforts to eliminate tradition. At a confirmation in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the late nineteenth century, the presiding minister, Bishop Henry Granjon, noted the enduring tradition of confirmation and the practice of compadrazgo (co-parentage), the extending of family ties to a child’s godparents. “You can ask any service whatsoever of your compadre,” he wrote. The ties that were created made for attachments between families and maintained the “unity of the Mexican population,” allowing them to “resist, to a certain extent, the invasions of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Mexicans would not learn English but instead “observe their own traditions and customs as they did before the annexation of their lands by the American Union.”

  The spread of national parishes in the post–Civil War era fostered this observance of “their own traditions and customs” among a multitude of
Catholic immigrant groups, including Latino Catholics from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere. National parishes posed something of a dilemma for church leaders. On the one hand, the church sought to be more assimilated into American society, to seem less foreign and un-American. On the other hand, the huge waves of Catholic immigrants from diverse lands that came to American shores necessitated separate language parishes. This came in part because of the swelling demand among parishioners for priests who spoke their home languages, respected their saints, and ate their foods. In this sense, Latino Catholics were part of a broader trend. In another sense, they remained separate and unequal, because of discrimination within the church as a body and the difficulty Latinos had in promoting their own to the priesthood. To a large extent, the Irish and German (and, later, Polish) traditions defined mainstream American Catholicism; Latino Catholicism still seemed tainted by its connection to “pagan” Indian ways. Most especially, this included the devotion to La Morenita, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the apparition who mythically appeared to the Indian neophyte convert Juan Diego outside Mexico City in 1531.

  Mexican American Catholics found some success in the postwar years in achieving national parishes. Latino Catholics in San Francisco in 1871, for example, convinced Archbishop Joseph Alemany to establish Our Lady of Guadalupe. “We believe,” they wrote to “Spanish and Latino Americans of San Francisco,” that the “happy idea of building a parish church exclusively for the Latino American residents and visitors to this ever growing city is not only consistent with evangelical doctrine, which commands us to propagate the faith by means of persuasion and the practice of virtue, but also reestablishes, in this great city, the splendor, brilliance, and influence of our race. Even if at present it finds itself in the backwaters of society, our culture’s greatness, dignity, and humanism are not diminished.” Answering fears that Latino Catholics were too poor and “invisible” to support such a project, the authors insisted that “our race is invisible because it is the precious stone buried in the soil of this populous city. . . . Our energy, virtues, and perseverance will make up for our relatively limited numbers; our self-sacrifice and endurance will overcome our lack of money and material goods.” San Francisco was to be the “place of encounter between North Americans and the peoples of our race.” A national parish would preserve the language in which Latino Catholics could best “express their affection, open their conscience, and lift their prayers to the Lord of mercy—their hearts would never feel fulfilled or unburdened unless they pray in the sublime language and in the same prayers their tender mother taught them.” Churches with Spanish-language teaching were “as essential to many members of our race as faith itself is as essential for salvation.” This emphasis on the spiritual nourishment of the Spanish language in the church setting continued strongly through the twentieth century, as Latino Catholic leaders fought the influx of Protestantism in the Latino community as well as the strong anticlericalism of radicals.

  In Texas, the Mexican Catholic population, numbering about 9,000 at the time of the Texas Republic, grew to 30,000 Latino Catholics in the diocese of Brownsville alone by the time of the Civil War, and Latinos were a large percentage of the 40,000 Catholics in San Antonio in 1870. At the turn of the twentieth century, Latinos made up close to half of all Catholics in Texas. The Mexican Catholic population in Texas skyrocketed through the early twentieth century, as the demand for migrant labor pulled working-class Mexicans northward. In Texas, many maintained close ties to Mexican culture and popular Catholicism. Again, Euro-American priests encountered the opportunities as well as the challenges involved with ministering to their flock. One father in San Benito, Texas noted that the Mexican Catholics possessed a “great religious mind in their own way”: they were respectful of the religion and of the fathers and constructed home altars including religious pictures and paintings that inspired faith. Mexican American Catholics were also solicitous of holy days, leading this priest to conclude that “certainly our Lord will deal leniently with many of these poor people[’s] defects and faults when he sees them keeping holy the day of his suffering.” In Texas as in New Mexico, images of the suffering Christ moved the people. They re-enacted the Passion in dramas, penitente rituals, and myriad other forms.

  In Los Angeles, from the 1850s to the 1870s, a smaller population, the need for law and order, and the lack of priests and pastors in the area in the 1850s and 1860s effectively required religious cooperation. The arrival in 1856 of Bishop Thaddeus Amat, by birth a Neapolitan, brought a directed effort to guide the Los Angeles Catholic Church into line with Catholic norms, very much as Archbishop Lamy was doing in New Mexico at the same time. The clerics, explains historian Michael Engh, wanted to “segregate Catholics culturally and socially from the mainstream of an antagonistic Protestant American society.” Following the rules set down by the Second Plenary Council in Baltimore in 1866, which attempted to regulate the spiritual expressions of the laity and enforce a “uniform adherence to ritual practices, patterns of religious behavior, and forms of prayer,” Bishop Amat worked to ensure that “one and the same discipline is everywhere observed.” Amat replaced the historic Mexican Madonna as patroness of the diocese with a Roman saint that he remembered from his own childhood. He was also intent on building an impressive cathedral, dramatizing the stability of Roman Catholicism and piety in the new land and magnifying the importance of the offices held by church officials. Amat also sought to limit the influence of secret societies such as the Fenians and Odd Fellows, and in general to separate his people from the growing power of Protestantism in Los Angeles and California.

  In the process, he effectively segregated and repressed Latino Catholics, most of whose practices were deemed “superstitious” or otherwise insufficiently spiritual and orderly. Amat and other bishops such as Lamy were in effect responding to the nativist sentiment expressed politically in Know-Nothing groups and political parties. In the process of enforcing national norms of what it would mean to be an American Catholic, though, they relegated Latino Catholicism itself to a secondary status.

  By the 1880s, though, the situation changed dramatically, as Protestant populations increased dramatically and Latino Catholics were in relative social decline. Still, even an increasingly Protestant Los Angeles looked like a pluralistic mosaic, with Latino Catholics, a substantial Jewish population, and a growing variety of Protestants (with Episcopalians, ironically, experiencing the most success at first, followed by the Methodists, who established the University of Southern California) creating a diverse local religious picture.

  Latino Catholic influence in southern California declined in the early twentieth century. This was because of the “Americanization” of Catholicism as well as the Protestantization of Los Angeles. The relative degree of tolerance in the smaller and pluralistic Los Angeles of the 1850s through the 1880s increasingly gave way to a thriving Protestant majority. A variety of nativist and Protestant supremacist groups such as the American Protective Association grew in influence. The centrally controlled Catholic clergy hunkered down in the struggle against Protestant and modernism. They refashioned a separate Catholic culture, which was responsive to central norms of Catholic doctrine and culture.

  As the city and county grew faster than the Catholic Church could attend to their needs, the historic role of the home in Mexican American religion became more important than ever. As one migrant laborer from Mexico put it, “I never go to church, nor do I pray. I have with me an amulet which my mother gave to me before dying. This amulet has the Virgin of Guadalupe on it and it is she who always protects me.” Another interviewee said that her grandmother had delineated the three pillars of religion: “Our Lord, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the Church. You can trust in the first two, but not in the third.” Many churches were named in honor of the Virgin, and often the churches were built with funds and labor from the people, with priests only following later. Informal associations and mutual aid societies, such as the Santo Nombre for men and the Asoci
acion Guadalupana for women, kept alive Latino traditions, particularly in areas where Mexican priests were unavailable.

  CONCLUSION

  Latino Catholicism within a pluralist but predominantly Protestant Los Angeles represented a small part of what was becoming the larger American story of race and religion. By the early twentieth century, the realities of pluralism, largely a function of massive immigration, clashed with a revival of Nativism and Anglo-Saxonism, nineteenth-century holdovers given a patina of scientific respectability by thinkers ironically dubbed as progressive. As cities grew more diverse, Protestant activists and anti-immigrant crusaders sought to shape American society in their own image. But the image of American society itself was in the process of transforming what constituted the bounds of American religious and social habitations.

  5

  Race, Religion, and Immigration

  Photograph from the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893

  Source: Public domain.

  THE CHICAGO WORLD’S FAIR was the place to be in 1893. The gleaming “White City” advertised technological and social utopias to come, while popular cultural attractions out on the Midway stretching outside the fair offered more physical thrills as well as curiosities and exotica (including human beings) on display. The fair brought together large audiences for intellectual fare, as well. The young historian Frederick Jackson Turner, fresh from his PhD from the pioneering American history program at Johns Hopkins University, gave his talk “The Frontier in American History,” the American historical equivalent of the Big Bang. In it, he enunciated how movement westward explained American development and implicitly warned of challenges to the American character to come now that the age of the frontier was over. Meanwhile, spiritual leaders from around the world gathered at the World’s Parliament of Religions. In many ways, the gathering there proved to be as significant for American religious evolution as Turner’s address was for American historical thought.